Buying vs Renting? Is It Still Even a Question?

Technology-on-subscription is paving the way to faster, more innovative enterprises

Technology has always been disruptive. I’m old enough to remember when people were darkly predicting that home taping was going to kill music. Thankfully, this dire warning never came true. In fact, according to Statista, music is in robust good health. More of it is actually being created – and consumed – than ever.

What technology did change is the landscape around music. It has evolved beyond recognition, with some of the most exciting new areas being downloading individual tracks (think iTunes) and streaming anything that takes your fancy (think KKbox, Spotify, Apple Music or MOOV). They not only enable consumers to dictate their own terms, but allow them to interact with the product in whatever way suits them best.

With no up-front investment, they provide nearly infinite choice at a relatively low cost, adapt instantly to users’ needs, and offer insight and recommendations based on analysis and algorithms. In effect, technology has eliminated most of the barriers music enthusiasts used to face by providing everyone with easy access to a nearly unlimited record collection

Freedom and Flexibility

That same desire for freedom, cost-efficiency and choice is driving the shift to the cloud, especially for smaller enterprises. Just like consumers are doing with music, SMBs can now access on subscription the kind of technologies that were previously out of their reach and affordable only to the biggest businesses.

SAP Analytics Cloud is a case in point. It’s a cloud-based solution, available in a variety of flexible subscription licensing options. And it is changing the IT landscape is a way that is very similar to the way downloads and streaming have changed music.

In addition to everything else, it removes repetitive steps from the process and ensures that the outcomes, advantages and benefits are available to everyone.

Combining Business intelligence (BI), collaborative planning, and predictive analytics in a single solution, SAP Analytics cloud has the advantage of being extremely scalable. It can connect and blend data from hundreds of sources and support as many users as any SMB is ever likely to employ – up to a million of them! The customized dashboards deliver the right data straight to the right user, on whatever device they prefer.

Connecting and refining data drawn from untrusted or isolated sources and unifying it is the first step in the journey towards ensuring data integrity and painting an accurate picture of the business.

Without that, streamlining processes and conducting data-driven decision making is impossible. Whether the data is stored in spreadsheets, databases on the premises, in the cloud, or some combination of all of them, SAP Analytics Cloud enables the business to analyze it.

It’s not just numbers. In many cases, a picture may be worth far more than gigabytes of figures. Visual analytics can bring real time data insights that support faster, more confident decision making!

Absorbing and understanding the impact of data is much easier when looking at an image rather than columns of numbers. Very often, visual analytics can provide the enterprise with improved predictability by revealing previously unnoticed trends that might otherwise have been misinterpreted or missed entirely.

Cloud is Music to Any SMBs Ears

The idea that only MNCs could afford analytics platforms isn’t true anymore. Easy-to-implement, budget-friendly tools – like SAP Analytics Cloud – are available for businesses of all sizes. And harnessing the latest technologies gives everyone in an organization the ability to discover actionable insights in real time.

It is especially attractive to SMBs, who appreciate the advantages of zero-up-front investment, manageable monthly payments, and the ability to scale up – or down – as market opportunities and business conditions dictate.

With so much freedom and flexibility, it’s hard to understand why any SMBs – which are always hard-pressed in terms of budgets, attracting and paying staff and accessing expertise — would choose anything but cloud to meet their analytics or any other IT needs.

In fact, you could say that the advantages of cloud-based solutions are becoming music to any SMBs ears!